Either you don't understand that websites are becoming memory hogs or your profile makes Firefox do weird things.

Oh, web sites are a part of the problem too. No denying that. At this point, many of them actually *are* worse than the browsers they run in. But that's not to say that browsers themselves haven't exploded over the last several years.

But that's not to say that browsers themselves haven't exploded over the last several years.

I don't agree with that assessment. Most browsers have a memory report now to see why it is using memory. If you take Firefox 1.0 and add features like a jit, type inference, anti phishing, databases, gpu acceleration etc. it uses 40MB instead of 32MB at startup.
Everything above that 40MB is either extensions or websites. Try about:memory

Lets blame iffy behaviour on what the end of the day is a set of text files on your machine.

How the fuck does a set of text files affect the reliability of a native desktop application? Obviously there is some iffy coding going on.

BTW I use Firefox.

Your whole computer is working on a set of text files be they machine code or computer languages. Mozilla is afraid of losing your data by converting and optimizing it so they are very careful. A nice example is a sqlite optimization where you get a 2-4 speedup. It was only activated on a new profile. Now they are trying to update every profile. To me it is very little effort to create a new profile and go on with what I was doing. So just to be sure my Firefox stays optimized I create a new profile about every 6 months. Especially because I run every nightly build as my daily browser.